1115.org

(1) Scoundrel

Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary has this entry for the word “scoundrel”:

A mean, worthless fellow; a rascal; a villain; a man without honor or virtue.

That’s the noun version; the adjective version goes:

Low; base; mean; unprincipled.

How long before they start adducing John McCain and his presidential-campaign-conduct as the classic examples of the word?

(2) Charlatan

Then there’s “charlatan”:

One who prates much in his own favor, and makes unwarrantable pretensions; a quack; an impostor; an empiric; a mountebank.

Or maybe you prefer the Dictionary.com Unabridged version:

a person who pretends to more knowledge or skill than he or she possesses; quack.

Thanks to the ongoing media group-suck, everyone knows how John McCain is such an expert on foreign policy, and Barack Obama a total tyro.

Of course, since we have heard it most often from the McCain campaign, we might at this point be smart enough to dismiss it immediately as obviously untrue.

But since we might not, the Jerusalem Post comes along and provides external verification. (Funny how nobody in the American media has thought to pass along this tidbit to their readers. It’s all those damn barbecue points, I’m sure.)

Two months ago in the Oval Office, President George W. Bush, coming to the end of a two-term presidency and presumably as expert on Israeli-Palestinian policy as he is ever going to be, was accompanied by a team of no fewer than five advisers and spokespeople during a 40-minute interview with this writer and three other Israeli journalists.

In March, on his whirlwind visit to Israel, Republican presidential nominee John McCain, one of whose primary strengths is said to be his intimate grasp of foreign affairs, chose to bring along Sen. Joe Lieberman to the interview our diplomatic correspondent Herb Keinon and I conducted with him, looked to Lieberman several times for reassurance on his answers and seemed a little flummoxed by a question relating to the nuances of settlement construction.

On Wednesday evening, toward the end of his packed one-day visit here, Barack Obama, the Democratic senator who is leading the race for the White House and who lacks long years of foreign policy involvement, spoke to The Jerusalem Post with only a single aide in his King David Hotel room, and that aide’s sole contribution to the conversation was to suggest that the candidate and I switch seats so that our photographer would get better lighting for his pictures.

Several of Obama’s Middle East advisers - including former Clinton special envoy Dennis Ross and ex-ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer - were hovering in the vicinity. But Obama, who was making only his second visit to Israel, knew precisely what he wanted to say about the most intricate issues confronting and concerning Israel, and expressed himself clearly, even stridently on key subjects.

Can anyone doubt that every major American media outlet has had this exact same experience interviewing these three men?

And yet The Washington Post and The New York Times and The L. A. Times and The Boston Globe and The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Chicago Tribune, among others — not to mention The Associated Press and Reuters — are perfectly content to go on parroting to us the twaddle that foreign policy is McCain’s strength and Obama’s weakness.